Writing in today's Washington Post, Markus Prior opines about the state of the media and the news, topics which are pretty on point for this blog, as well. He has a pretty bleak view of the world -- that more access to information paradoxically makes people more ignorant, and that most of the great unwashed are unable to distinguish between news and entertainment. He says:
The new fault line of civic involvement is between news junkies and entertainment fans. Entertainment fans are abandoning news and politics not because it has become harder to be involved but because they have decided to devote their time to content that promises greater immediate gratification. As a result, they learn less about politics and are less likely to vote at a time when news junkies are becoming even more engaged. Unlike most forms of inequality, this rising divergence in political involvement is a result of voluntary consumption decisions. Making sure everybody has access to media won't fix the problem -- it is exactly the cause.
And a bit later:
Happy as they are with a remote control in one hand and a computer mouse in the other, they never consciously weigh the pleasure of constant entertainment against the cost of leaving politics to news junkies and politicians.
There is more, of course. The public is more uniformed than ever before, politicians will pay less attention to those who don't pay attention to them, etc.
He even makes light of my personal concern, that we are increasingly living in single opinion information ghettos and often choose to seek out information from only the left or the right. To this point, he deploys the "many" argument, as in:
When media users get what they want all the time, does anyone get hurt? Well, yes. The expansion of news choices has many worried about partisan bias. Such worries are overstated. Fox News's Bill O'Reilly preaches mostly to the converted; there have always been passionate conservatives, and exposure to one-sided media will hardly make them more conservative. Plus, a little O'Reilly doesn't harm anybody. The danger lies not in larger audiences for politically biased news outlets per se but in exclusive exposure to outlets all biased in the same direction. But many Fox News viewers also watch CNN and MSNBC.
Read that paragraph a few times, I did. Then tell me what the heck point it makes. And "many" viewers also watch? sure...
What he misses is the solution, which is obvious and in many ways is already in place via Plato's Republic and the idea of a Philosopher King, educated enough to decide what information people should imbibe, and wise enough to be willing to deceive their subjects if that is what it takes to get people to do the right thing. Sound familiar?
Being at least loosely based in the real world, my observation is that the the problem is not entertainment, it is perceived and real powerlessness. At the recent iMeme conference, I watched Craig Vetner, a pretty smart and powerful guy, express a huge level of frustration with his inability to affect change in any meaningful way at the governmental level. If he struggles and feels powerless, what's the point for the mere mortals roaming the world engaging in the process?